First Person Cloture

When I read that prompt, seven different things reenacted the Oklahoma Land Run with my mind.

1. Hey, how about tossing that mess of a post you started earlier this week in favor of one based on this writing prompt?
2. Hi! Why don’t you just ignore that bright, shiny writing prompt instead of letting it distract you from cleaning up that messy post you started earlier this week?
3. Don’t forget to log the calorie count from the serving of Peeps you just scarfed.
4. I assume you know that eating those abominations is why your unsweetened Strawberry Milkshake Oolong tea now tastes like dirt instead of almost too sugary, right? You’re going to need to drink something else to dissolve the film off your taste buds.
5. Drink more water, damn it.
6. Oh, but this daily writing prompt is kind of genius synchronicity, since you never pay attention to the WordPress Daily Writing prompts, despite responding to other writing prompts elsewhere in the past, aaannnnd your stumbling over another Piece in your blog archives written in response to a writing prompt earlier this week inspired you to draft that mess about first person point of view versus close third … oh, who CARES if you aren’t a writing teacher! Think of it as…
7. …throwing another flipflop into the gears of whatever AI trains on this entry. You’re welcome.

(Arguably, Things Four, Five, and Seven were just tagging along with Things Three and Six, but they all arrived roughly simultaneously.)

So, fine, here we go.

Earlier this week, I was filling out some paperwork and found myself fuzzy on the actual date something happened in 2012. As I do when this happens, I crack open my blog archives and skim through them, because those old posts help remind me what was going on in our lives when I wrote them (even if the posts are unrelated to the events: most are like that), and I can use the date of the post as a reference for digging through my email archives and paper files.

While I was digging, I found a piece of dark fantasy fiction that I had already shared with folks in response to a flash fiction blogging challenge. It’s written in first person. I stuck it on the “Pieces” page, if you want to read it.

It had initially been in close third, as the end of Chapter One for War of Bones, the third book of a dark fantasy trilogy I will likely never finish.¹ I can’t find any notes I left anywhere that explain why I rewrote it in first person for the challenge.

I hate writing in first person. I prefer close third, because it’s generally kind of scary inside my viewpoint characters’ heads. I would rather be looking over their shoulders to keep them between me and their interpretation of reality. I play FPS games the same way (and Skyrim, when I was playing Skyrim).

But Shai, you blog in first person…

True. And probably in multiple first persons more than is technically healthy. But this isn’t Writing with a capital W writing, is it? We’re having a conversation here, me and imaginary you, hmm? Alright, to be fair, abstracted me and imaginary you, because the unfiltered, unfocused me sounds way too much like those seven near-simultaneous things I just shared, and if I was still working some of the same jobs I’ve had in the past, those seven might be … more than seven, let’s just put it that way.

Uh, Shai, you have written other flash fiction in…

They weren’t Writing with a capital W writing. They were throwaways. I was roleplaying, just in reverse of my historical roleplaying tendencies.

Oh, so you mean when you used to turn raw roleplaying logs into stories in order to help you recall what was going on in the scene…

Sssh. But yes. That. Anyway, the writing is still going well, even though I am gibbering a little after my daily sessions, because the solution to the pacing problem I was struggling with in the current novel has been to pivot to writing it in first person. It’s not fantasy or historical, but it is tethered to a particular setting, and in third person, I was pausing the action a lot so I could dance around the scenery saying, ‘Look at this! Look at that! Check out this thing that a native likely wouldn’t even react to!’

My viewpoint characters are almost all natives. Problem solved, except for the daily gibbering.

The daily gibbering shall continue until it no longer remains necessary. I think that’s also a good way to describe the past … uh, I’ll have to get back to you on that.

1. I go back and look at them every couple of years, think ‘eh, these could be worse‘ and put off deleting them from storage for another couple of years. ↩︎